Firearms in Tokugawa Villages

According to David Howell’s recent article in Japanese Studies, at any one time there were around 150 000-200 000 matchlock muskets circulating within peasant villages during the Tokugawa period, many being produced in Sakai and Kunitomi in Ōmi Province (Shiga Prefecture). Not targeted during Hideyoshi’s katanagari, guns weren't consistently regulated by the Shogunate until the 1650s. While ‘illicit weapons’ were confiscated, the exceptions became imagined as farming implements rather than weapons and categorized as hunter’s guns (odoshi teppō) and farmer’s guns (ryōshi teppō) for frightening and slaying animal pests (boars and deer). After the repeal of Tsunayoshi’s ‘laws of compassion’ shortly after his death in 1709, farmers were permitted to use live ammunition and their guns reclassified as ‘two-season’ or ‘four-season’. Unlike hunter’s guns, essential for their occupation and afforded greater importance, farmer’s guns were officially considered expediential and temporary, and were formally ‘borrowed’ from the government. By the early 18th century for practical reasons gun licenses were regulated by village authorities (for transferring the licenses of dead/incapacitated gun holders, and managing firearm ‘borrowing’ and repairs).

There were of course many unregistered guns floating around, many being unofficial replacements of damaged ones. Inspection tours were carried out in the Kantō region in 1838-40, responding to the threat of masterless samurai, unregistered commoners (consistently assumed to be criminal) and assorted ruffians. Rather than directly targeting warumono, these tours sought to dry up the pool of hidden, unlicensed firearms in villages, and in this were largely successful. In actual practice mainly damaged guns were confiscated with the remaining unlicensed ones entrusted to village officials who would proceed to request valid licenses for them.

From the early 1810s, but more particularly after the 1840s peasants occaisionally engaged in vigilante action, and sent requests for licenses for firearms for self-protection (yōjin teppō) in the face of escalating warumono violence. Capable villagers in Kōzuke and Musashi were officially enjoined to provide support in the repression of the 1864 Tengutō Insurrection, and the Bushu Outburst in 1866, and at other times to assist the Kantō Regulatory Patrol. Early in that decade bakufu edicts encouraged villages to react with necessary force in emergencies. ‘In the true spirit of micromanaging Tokugawa bureaucracy, the edict included instructions concerning the banners each village force would display and pointers on the preparation of bentō lunches’. Even so, there is little evidence of peasants actually using firearms to kill anyone. After the Restoration, the Meiji state placed tight restrictions on farmers’ gun ownership, with only a minority of professional hunters awarded licenses by 1876.